Employee Engagement Surveys in 2026: What’s Changing and Why?

Employee engagement surveys are changing. The fundamentals have not disappeared, and people still want good managers, fair treatment, opportunities to develop, a clear sense of purpose and confidence in their organisation. What is changing is what organisations need to understand about their people.

Over the past 6 to 12 months, we have seen growing interest in areas such as artificial intelligence, organisational change, workload and productivity, confidence in the future, and whether employee feedback actually leads to action. We’re also seeing organisations reconsider how they measure engagement itself.

Moving from the drivers of engagement to the outcome

For many years, UK organisations have drawn on the Engage for Success model and its four enablers: Strategic Narrative, Engaging Managers, Employee Voice and Organisational Integrity. These remain important, as they describe many of the conditions that help create an engaged workforce, and Engage for Success itself describes them as useful lenses through which organisations can assess their approach. However, there’s a useful distinction to be drawn between what creates engagement and what engagement looks like when it exists.

This is one reason we’re seeing greater interest in measures such as Say, Stay and Strive:

• Say: Would people speak positively about the organisation?
• Stay: Do they want to continue working there?
• Strive: Are they motivated to do their best and make an additional effort when it matters?

The model is not new. Aon has used Say, Stay and Strive for many years and found the measures to have strong reliability across organisations and regions. What makes the approach particularly useful today is that it gives organisations a clearer engagement outcome. Leadership, management, communication, recognition, development, workload and culture can then be examined as the things that may be influencing that outcome, which makes the survey easier to explain and, importantly, easier to act on.

Is eNPS beginning to lose its appeal?

Another change we’re seeing is organisations questioning the value of the Employee Net Promoter Score, or eNPS. The question itself can still be useful: how likely would you be to recommend this organisation as a good place to work? The difficulty comes with the way those answers are turned into a score.

Under the traditional approach, only people scoring 9 or 10 out of 10 are counted positively as promoters. Those giving 7 or 8 are treated as passive and do not contribute positively to the score, while everybody scoring between 0 and 6 is classed as a detractor. That creates some obvious problems. An employee giving their organisation 8 out of 10 sounds relatively positive, but that response makes no positive contribution to eNPS. Qualtrics has questioned the use of eNPS as a primary employee experience measure, pointing to the limitations of the 11-point scale and the amount of information lost when responses are divided into promoters, passives and detractors.

There’s another issue for UK organisations. Research has shown that people in different countries use rating scales differently, and a 26-country study found significant differences in the tendency of respondents to choose extreme answers, with UK respondents less likely than US respondents to select the most positive response available. That does not prove that every UK eNPS score is artificially low, but it does mean there’s a genuine risk in using a scoring method where only the very top of an 11-point scale counts positively.

Our advice would not be to stop asking whether colleagues would recommend their organisation, as advocacy is valuable information. The better question is whether advocacy alone should be treated as the measure of employee engagement. Increasingly, we think it should form part of a wider measure.

AI has arrived in the employee survey

Perhaps the clearest new topic is artificial intelligence. A year or two ago, AI questions tended to focus on awareness or future expectations, but that has changed very quickly. Qualtrics reported in its 2026 research that 52% of employees across its global study were using AI at work daily or weekly, seven percentage points higher than the previous year. Gallup has also found that simply providing AI tools is not enough, and that employees are much more likely to use AI regularly when it fits naturally into their work and when their manager actively supports its use.

For employee surveys, that means the questions need to mature too. For organisations introducing AI, we would encourage questions around:

• whether people understand how AI will be used
• whether they feel confident using it
• whether suitable training and support are available
• whether there are clear rules about appropriate use
• whether people trust the way AI is being introduced

Where AI is already established, the questions should move on. Is it saving time? Is it improving the quality of work? Is it making jobs easier? Is it helping people make better decisions? Are employees actually seeing the benefits that were promised?

There’s also a human side to consider. Recent Gallup research found that frequent AI users can still have concerns about job security, and that good management and clear support make a significant difference to those concerns. Measuring AI should therefore not be treated as a technology exercise, but as part of understanding the employee experience.

How well are people coping with change?

Change is another area receiving much more attention. Most organisations have experienced some combination of restructuring, new technology, changing leadership, cost pressures, new ways of working or changes to roles. The important question is no longer simply whether employees like change, because that tells us very little. A more useful question is whether people feel supported through it.

Qualtrics’ 2026 research found that feeling supported while adapting to change was the strongest driver of employee expectations in its study. It also found an important difference between technological change and organisational disruption: new tools can be energising when they make work better, while restructures, cuts and leadership changes can be much harder for employees.

We would therefore encourage organisations going through significant change to look at issues such as:

• understanding why the change is happening
• clarity about what it means personally
• confidence in the way change is being managed
• whether people feel listened to
• whether managers have enough information to support their teams

Change itself is not necessarily the problem. Poorly managed change often is.

Workload is becoming a question about sustainable performance

Questions about workload and wellbeing have been included in employee surveys for years, but the conversation is changing. With organisations under pressure to control costs and improve productivity, many employees are being asked to do more with the resources available, and Qualtrics describes this continuing pressure to “do more with less” as one of the features shaping the 2026 employee experience.

That means there’s value in going beyond a simple statement such as “my workload is manageable”. Instead, organisations may need to understand whether people can perform well at the current pace of work. Questions might explore whether colleagues have enough time and resources to do a good job, whether priorities are clear and whether the current pace of work feels sustainable. That links wellbeing with performance rather than treating them as separate subjects.

Confidence in the future matters

Another theme we expect to see more frequently is confidence in the organisation’s future. In uncertain conditions, employees are not only judging their current experience, they are also asking themselves where the organisation is going, whether there’s a future there for them, and whether they trust the decisions being made. Qualtrics continues to identify belief in a positive organisational future as one of the important factors shaping employee attitudes.

This also connects naturally with Stay. People may enjoy their current role but still be considering leaving if they lack confidence in the future, so adding questions about organisational direction, future confidence and an employee’s own future within the organisation can provide an important early warning.

Employee voice is increasingly about action

For years, surveys have asked questions such as “I feel able to express my views” or “my opinions are listened to”. Those remain useful, but they only tell half the story, because employees increasingly want to know what happened after they spoke.

Qualtrics reported in 2026 that only 48% of individual contributors said they had seen positive changes resulting from employee feedback, and the same research found much stronger engagement and intention to stay in organisations that had increased their employee listening. That makes a question such as “I can see positive action being taken as a result of colleague feedback” increasingly important, because it moves the discussion from simply providing people with a voice to demonstrating that the organisation listens and responds. Repeatedly asking for feedback without visible action can eventually damage trust rather than build it.

Flexible working is moving from availability to fairness

Flexible and hybrid working has not disappeared from employee surveys, but the questions are becoming more mature. The issue is less about whether hybrid working exists and more about how well it works. CIPD research found that 91% of UK employers offered some form of flexible working in 2025, but that access was far from equal. It also found that employers could see both benefits and drawbacks from hybrid working, including positive effects on recruitment and retention alongside concerns around management, organisational culture and connection to purpose.

For many organisations, the useful questions now concern fairness. Do people have equal access to information? Can remote workers access the same development and career opportunities? Can colleagues work effectively across different locations? Do working arrangements help people perform at their best? These questions tell us far more than simply asking how many days somebody would like to work from home.

The survey should change because work is changing

None of this means organisations should rebuild their engagement questionnaire every year. In fact, constantly changing questions makes it difficult to track progress. A good engagement survey still needs a stable core covering the things that matter consistently: leadership, management, communication, development, recognition, inclusion, wellbeing and culture. But there should also be room for the questionnaire to evolve.

In 2026, we would encourage organisations to consider whether their survey gives them enough information about five particularly important areas:

1. AI and the changing nature of work
2. How well people are supported through change
3. Whether workload and performance are sustainable
4. Confidence in the organisation’s future
5. Whether employee feedback leads to visible action

The aim is not to make surveys longer, but to make them more relevant. An effective engagement survey should help an organisation understand not simply how its people feel, but why they feel that way, what’s changing, and where action will make the greatest difference. That is where employee surveys have the greatest value.